By Yann Louvel and Greig Aitken, BankTrack, 20 June 2016

The dust has now settled on this year’s bank AGM season in Europe. However, with new, progressive coal financing policy announcements thin on the ground, it’s been more a case of the dust gathering on the coal finance toolkits of most of Europe’s big banking names. And this in spite of the usual concerted advocacy from coal campaigners and the growing urgency for the banks to quit coal.

By Move Your Money UK, 19 April 2016

Campaigners celebrated a momentous announcement yesterday, when RBS revealed that it has ditched a whopping 70% of its fossil fuel investments in the last year alone, whilst doubling funding for renewable energy, to £1 billion. RBS claims that this makes it ‘the largest lender to the UK renewable energy sector’.

This is quite some turnaround from the bank formerly known as ‘the oil and gas bank’, which was found to be the fourth most invested UK bank in fossil fuels in our Divest! campaign, with £14.4 billion in fossil fuel extraction in 2012 alone. For many campaigners who have worked tirelessly to get RBS out of fossil fuels, such as Global Justice Now, Friends of the Earth Scotland, the Robin Hood Tax, People & Planet, Fossil Free UK, Platform and so many others, this was a moment to celebrate.

As the Royal Bank of Scotland released its Sustainability Review last week, Scotland’s Herald newspaper reported that the state-owned bank “aims to lead from the front on ethical banking” – although it admitted that it could take them up to five years to get there.

This is quite an ambition for any bank, and especially for one whose financing for Canadian tar sands led to the bank being singled out for occupation by Climate Camp activists in 2010; whose financed emissions (i.e. the emissions supported by the bank’s lending) were recently estimated by World Development Movement to be up to 1.6 times the emissions of the whole of the UK; and which was shown by recent research to be the UK’s biggest financier of the coal mining industry.